Dear friends:

The below announcement of an ABC program was forwarded to me today.  We have heard about this threat for a long time, and it has prophetic implications.  I am surprised ABC is airing this.  I am told that the program will air tonight at 8PM CST on ABC News.

Jim

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Subject: Super Volcano

http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Science/story?id=2366987&page=1
Too Hot to Handle
A Potential Supervolcano in Our Backyard

Aug. 29, 2006- - What could cover the globe in ash, plunge Earth into an
ice age and end life as we know it?

The answer is found in what lies beneath: supervolcanoes. Supervolcanoes
are very rare. There is no need to run out and buy duct tape and plastic
sheeting for this one. The last known supervolcano was about 74,000
years ago. But they are real, and one potential supervolcano lies right
here in the United States, in one of America's most profound areas of
natural beauty.

Just 20 miles beneath the earth's surface lies a pressurized ocean of
molten rock looking for a way out. And a massive release of that molten
rock would create a supervolcano -- arguably the largest natural
disaster humanity would ever face.

Unlike regular volcanoes, which are shaped like mammoth cones,
supervolcanoes spring from massive canyons -- calderas -- that measure
hundreds of miles across. Underneath their surface is a vast lake of
lava. When the underground liquid rock -- magma -- bursts forth to the
surface, a series of violent, massive explosions could occur in a
wide-ranging eruption that could last several days. It would incinerate
anyone within a hundred miles, and layers of ash would blanket much of
the earth.

"These eruptions are so big that you couldn't really see them, because
you couldn't be close enough to the volcano, watching it and survive.
You could watch it from a satellite and you could see the volcano erupt
and see the ash cloud begin to spread," said Michael Rampino, geologist
and professor of earth sciences at New York University.

The ash cloud would become so thick it could cover the sun, causing
global temperatures to plummet.

Scientists say such an event wiped out almost the world's entire
population 74,000 years ago, when a supervolcano erupted in Toba, near
the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Only a few thousand people survived.
Supervolcanoes are little understood by scientists. Their underground
canyons of molten rock are immensely vast, making their potential
starting points hard to identify. It has been only in the last decade
that scientists have started uncovering these deadly hot spots around
the world, but they still don't know where they all are.

So far, scientists have identified nearly 40 possible supervolcano hot
spots, including one right in our own backyard, underneath Yellowstone
National Park. Scientists estimate that the Yellowstone area will
experience a supervolcano eruption approximately once every 600,000
years. The last one occurred more than 630,000 years ago.

So how would we know a supervolcano is coming? And is there anything
people could do to stop it or limit its destruction?

"We haven't seen a supervolcanic eruption, so we're not sure about what
we will see," said John Grattan, a volcanologist at the Institute of
Geography Earth Sciences at the University of Wales. "But one of the
things that we would expect would be increased earthquake activity, an
increase in the small geyser eruptions that you get in Yellowstone."
"The bottom line is that when one of these eruptions occurs, it's going
to be a global disaster," said NYU's Rampino. "The only question is when
and where."

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